Michael Petrilli on Poverty, Single Mothers, and Parenting
3 min read
Michael Petrilli, on poverty, single mothers, and parenting:
Second, the reason the overwhelming majority of children are born poor is that they are born to young single mothers without much education or many job prospects. These mothers will struggle mightily to provide the kind of home environment that is necessary to help children get off to a good start in life and in school. To put it bluntly, they tend to be bad parents. (Not "bad" in a moral sense but "bad" as in "ineffective"; with their brains literally maxed out with basic survival, it's easy to understand why.)
I give Michael Petrilli credit for giving voice to what many people within the corporate education reform camp think, but would never say in public.
Petrilli continues:
Let me float a third option: A renewed effort to encourage young, uneducated, unemployed women to delay childbearing until they are ready--emotionally, financially--to start a family. Let's promote a simple rule: Don't have babies until you can afford them. If everybody in America followed this rule, most long-term child poverty would disappear, and parenting would improve dramatically.
I don't highlight this post to criticize Petrilli per se, although his ideas are offensive, and attempting to base policy on this flawed logic leads to predictably flawed results. Petrilli's post is worth reading and study because he is repeating in public what many people are saying in private. In some circles, Petrilli's arguments are accepted as fact.
Ideas like this do not spring fully formed into the public arena without getting vetted and repeated within smaller circles first. For example, when Richard Mourdock spoke on rape, he was repeating talking points commonly used in anti-abortion circles. In the same way, Petrilli's words mirror ideas and attitudes held within the neoliberal and corporate reform circles.
The reality is that many people currently living in poverty in the US work multiple jobs, and many jobs do not pay workers an adequate salary to afford the basics. Holding single mothers in contempt in the name of educational reform is despicable.
UPDATE: I didn't highlight this in my original post, but it merits adding: Mother's don't create babies on their own. And, Petrilli's argument completely ignores the reality of the wage gap. There are other shortcomings to his arguments as well, but given that I'm writing this on a Sunday, I'd prefer to leave this incomplete than to become this guy.
